October 31, 2005 -- BACK in mid-September, when we last dropped by for one
of our typically unwelcome visits to the New York Stock Exchange, the Mount
Vesuvius of exculpatory P.R. was busy spewing baloney in all directions.

Beneath the accumulating effluvium lay buried the exchange's latest
embarrassment: Its apparent cave-in, only days earlier, to demands from a
group of animal rights extremists that the Big Board scrap its planned
listing of a company that does drug testing on animals.

Since then, the eruptions have continued, and by last week the Big Board's
lava flow of obfuscation and half-truths had spread all the way to
Washington, D.C., and a committee hearing room of the U.S. Senate.

In Room 406 of the Dirksen Office Building last Wednesday, Oklahoma
Republican James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment &
Public Works, called a hearing to shed some much-needed light on the NYSE's
apparent willingness to be bullied and pushed around by the animals rights
crowd.

The animal crazies had been demanding for weeks that the Big Board reject a
listing application from a New Jersey company called Life Sciences Research
Inc. that engages in drug testing on animals.

Life Sciences has been in the crosshairs of extremists for years. In 2001
its CEO was beaten nearly to death in Britain by animal rights thugs
wielding pick ax handles. Two years later, Deloitte & Touche dumped the
company as an audit client after extremists stalked and harassed Deloitte
employees for weeks.

Marsh & McLennan quit as Life Sciences' insurance broker, and Citicorp no
longer serves as the company's banker, for the same reason. Aetna no longer
writes insurance coverage for the company; Johnson & Johnson and Merck have
stopped doing business with it as well.

Exchange officials paid no attention, distracted by their struggle to merge
the Big Board with electronic trading platform Archipelago.

But the animal rights nuts were on a roll, and when the exchange said that
Life Sciences had been accepted for a Big Board listing, the wackos simply
intensified their campaign.

Within weeks, they got what they wanted. On Sept. 7, minutes before the
company's shares were to begin trading, the NYSE reversed itself. According
to one rumor, the flip-flop came after floor specialists said they'd
received threats of violence if they dared to trade the Life Sciences
shares.

News of the NYSE flip-flop was delivered to the Life Sciences brass
personally — but with no explanation — by the exchange's president,
Catherine Kinney, and the stonewalling has gone on ever since.

When one of America's best known and highly regarded institutions soils
itself in this way, the public has a right to know why — which is what last
week's Senate hearing was all about: To force the NYSE to come clean.

But save for a lone reporter from Reuters, no one from the press even
bothered to show up. And perhaps because of that, at least one well-known
member of the committee didn't turn up either.

That person was New York's own (and only) voice on the committee: Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, who joined the committee's 14 other Senate no-shows
to cut class. A staff aide later said she had been busy with commitments
elsewhere, but in spite of repeated requests for details, her office failed
to provide any.

Too bad, since by not showing up for the hearing, the uber-ambitious junior
senator from New York missed a golden opportunity to hear for herself the
lengths to which animal rights extremists are prepared to go to get their
way.

This came when a spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front — classified by
the FBI as a domestic terrorist organization — stunned the hearing by
claiming that it was "morally justified" to murder medical researchers in
order to save their laboratory animals, which he likened to Jewish prisoners
in Nazi extermination camps.

EVENTUALLY Sen. Lautenberg grew so incensed at Bernard's stonewalling that
he started to bluster and fume about subpoenaing the NYSE's own internal
records.

Whether or not the committee does issue such a subpoena, its sparsely
attended hearing last Wednesday at least highlighted the larger danger that
has lurked in the NYSE's appeasing behavior.

After all, if the "mighty" Big Board can be buffaloed by a handful of
puppy-preferring psychos, what happens when other extremists, who think
trees and other forms of plant life also have rights, see for themselves
that the exchange can be pushed around?

If the resulting threats get severe enough, will the Big Board's President
Flip-Flop agree to de-list International Paper Co., or perhaps Georgia
Pacific?

The exchange's weaseling efforts to distance itself from its own behavior
shows just how inexcusable the NYSE brass know that behavior to have been —
and how embarrassed by it they still are.

But every day that passes without 'fessing up to it is a day that brings the
Big Board closer to becoming a target all over again.